During a recent hearing of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, some congressmen displayed a frightening lack of understanding of the basics of global warming and its effects. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who was the former chairman of the full committee, had this to say:
“I believe that earth’s climate is changing, but I think it’s changing for natural variation reasons. And I think man-kind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the earth. When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we get shade. When it’s cold, we find a warm place to stay. … Adaptation to shifts in temperature is not that difficult.”
This statement belies a fundamental misunderstanding, or to give Rep. Barton the benefit of the doubt, a purposefully disingenuous mischaracterization, of the effects of global warming. And, his comment is similar to a popular argument by global warming deniers, which conflates local and global effects of global warming. The underlying assumption of this kind of argument is that the negative effects from global warming are limited to a local level, rather than a systemic, global level. The natural conclusion from this argument is that as it gets hotter, people can turn up the dials on their air conditioners. (This is essentially the reason why many global warming deniers happily jeer when unseasonably cold weather occurs.)
But, that’s an oversimplification. The problem with global warming is not that it will merely cause the air to get hotter, resulting in some minor discomfort and increased annoyance. When the planet warms—and we’re only talking about a few degrees over long periods of time—it affects the global climate patterns, which results in dramatic shifts in weather systems. Also, that increased surface temperature negatively affects ecosystems and animal species. And we don’t know what that will mean for humans.
Rep. Barton also said something that seems to support taking immediate actions to counter global warming. He said, “Nature doesn’t seem to adjust to people as much as people adjust to nature.” If nature doesn’t adjust well to changes that people make (and here it seems that Rep. Barton is unconsciously implying that humans are in fact contributing to global warming), but people can adjust, then that’s all the more reason to take actions to stem the negative effects of global warming.
